With technology growing every day, you have many options to choose from when it comes to recruiting assistance for your business and/or personal life. Delegating to a responsible, reliable virtual professional is not “handing off your work” to another .. it’s responsible business management. If you are reading this asking, ”Do I need to hire a virtual assistant?” then chances are you do. Ask yourself these five simple questions and you will know for sure.

Almost any business can benefit from hiring a virtual assistant, whether you’re a manager with several staff members or a solopreneur. Most virtual assistants have a varied skill set, though most people associate them with only secretarial work. In reality, many VAs also offer other skills like writing blog posts, doing basic graphic design work & tweaks, doing HTML and WordPress work, and so on.

If you’re in a leadership role, the concept of delegation won’t be new to you .. it’s an essential skill to have. What might be a little more challenging is delegating to a team that works for you remotely, like when you contract with a virtual assistant. Some businesses have whole teams working remotely, over several different time zones. Managing how people work on projects together can be challenging but well worth the effort. Here are some simple tips that can help you to effectively delegate to your remote virtual administrative team.

Like with any business, it’s important to manage expectations and have clear boundaries. This is even more important with a virtual business so make sure that you have clear, measurable goals in place and that your processes and vision are communicated effectively. Your team always needs to feel supported.

A virtual assistant schedule can be frantic. Finding time to spend with family and to recharge is important in between working at the office, traveling to conferences and meeting with potential clients. Not much time is left for writing, though, but you must do it nonetheless. For the best return on the time you invest, try to write deliberately – think about what and how of your writing. Don’t just write to teach others or to boost your business, write to become an improved leader. The rest – authority, clients, business – will come naturally.

Take a look at your to-do list, are there tasks on there that are taking away the time you should be using on your business? If so, it’s probably time to start looking for a virtual assistant. A virtual assistant (also called a VA) can free you from the administrative tasks that aren’t an effective use of your entrepreneurial time. One advantage of a virtual assistant is that they work remotely and as needed so you don’t have to spend as much as you would for an employee that works on site, all the time .. you know, the clock punchers. So .. ready to contract a VA for your business? If you are, here are some tips on finding one and working with one successfully.

A common dilemma that many who are starting out on their entrepreneurial journey as a virtual assistant face is: What should I charge for my rate? They look at their competitors and set their price on the lower end of the price range that they observed .. or worse, compare to those rates on bid-to-hire sites, which are notoriously low. The reasoning behind this seems to make sense, they want to compete and they don’t want the price tag to be the reason they didn’t get that customer. So let me be clear: This is NOT a good strategy. Period.